About

The Producing Team (and ASL Interpreter) during our first national webinar, March 16 2020.

The Freelance Artist Resource Producing Collective is an iterative, responsive project composed of five freelance producers and culture makers: Nicole Brewer, Hannah Fenlon, Ann Marie Lonsdale, Abigail Vega, and Amara Brady. Together, they manage this website and produce a series of webinars to provide resources to and raise the collective knowledge body of freelance, unaffiliated artists in the United States.

Mission

The Freelance Artist Resource Producing Collective is a short term intervention that gathers and amplifies efforts and ideas that secure freelance artists’ livelihood and centers their humanity in the immediate present, while preparing the U.S. arts and culture field for a radically equal, inclusive, anti-racist, and progressive future.

Vision

Once this crisis has passed, we envision a field committed to empowering, caring for, and centering freelance artists. We can never return to “business as usual.” We envision a culture sector that renounces the extractive economic model of the non-profit industrial complex, recognizes how reliant it has been on the under-compensated and uncompensated labor of freelance artists, and reorganizes itself as a healthier ecosystem that benefits all.

Values

Amplification over Replication: we recognize that countless collectives in the culture and social sectors have been doing similar organizing for generations, and that our work now is not to create redundancies, but to join in, support, and amplify the efforts of those who have a history of providing resources and care to artists and other vulnerable communities.

Paying Artists: we believe in compensating artists (and all others) for their contributions and labor, and we allocate funds transparently and with an approach that accounts for individual identity and social location.

Respect for Artists’ Humanity: we prioritize a respect for time, caring and family responsibilities, and health over productivity and deadlines.

Creating Communal Resources: we believe in crowd-sourcing, open-sourcing, and knowledge-sharing. We will not build paywalls around our resource offerings, and we will continue to invite members of the freelance artist community to contribute to our growing resource list and online programs.

Community Tithing: we attempt to extend 10% of our cash resources to other collectives and organizations providing relief, with a focus on attending to the most vulnerable populations of freelance artists, including BIPOC, queer and LGBTQ+, undocumented, elder, and disabled folks.

We Work in Draft: our work, efforts (and even this statement) are living organisms. As we learn, receive feedback, and reflect, we will reshape the above values and our processes according to how we can best be of service to the freelance artist community.